Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory (9 page)

Identifying whether an individual has drowned or died by some other means is one of the oldest and most difficult medical dilemmas. In the thirteenth century, a book by Chinese physicians entitled
The Washing Away of Wrongs
addressed the thorny issue of suspicious death by drowning. Even today, the medical community has no universally agreed diagnostic tests for drowning. Spilsbury himself had closely studied the pathology of drowning in the spectacular “brides in the bath” case of 1915, when George Joseph Smith, a swindler and bigamist, was accused of killing at least three of his wives. In each case, the victim had been found in the bath. Spilsbury exhumed the bodies and set about proving that they could not have died by natural causes. In court, it took him just twenty minutes to convince the jury that it is possible to murder someone, and leave no marks of violence, by suddenly submerging him or her in water while bathing. Smith was hanged.

In the course of that case, Spilsbury had become intimately acquainted with the symptoms of drowning: the fine white froth, known as
champagne de mousse
, in the lungs and on the lips; the marbled and swollen appearance of the lungs, inflated by the inhalation of water; water in the stomach; foreign material, such as vomit or sand, in the lungs; and hemorrhages in the middle ear. A drowning person dies violently struggling, often bruising or rupturing the muscles in the neck or shoulder as he grasps and gasps for air. None of these symptoms would be present in the body of Glyndwr Michael, who had died not in water but in a hospital bed. On the other side of the coin, anyone killed by phosphorus, however small the dose, would have yellowed skin and probably gastric burns, as well as significant traces of the chemical in the body, easily detectable with the science of 1943.

The renowned forensic scientist did not examine the body of Glyndwr Michael. Instead, Sir Bernard offered his opinion, as was his habit, de haut en bas, and stuck to it, come hell or high water.

Spilsbury was also wrong in his complacent avowal that Spain contained no able pathologists. If the body was examined by a country doctor, the deception might pass unnoticed, but it was intended that the body and its documents should pass into German hands: there was at least one highly trained pathologist in Spain working for German intelligence, who would be able to spot the imposture as fast as Spilsbury himself, and probably faster. So far from offering certainty, Sir Bernard’s opinion, accepted by Montagu, represented an enormous gamble. If it failed, then the victims of Spilsburyism could number in their thousands.

Montagu would later claim that the body used in the deception had “died from pneumonia after exposure;”
²⁴
that his relatives had been contacted and told that the body was needed for a “really worthwhile purpose;”
²⁵
and that permission was duly obtained “on condition that I should never
²⁶
let it be known whose corpse it was.” None of this was true. Montagu and Cholmondeley certainly made “feverish enquiries into his past
²⁷
and about his relatives,” but only to ensure that Glyndwr Michael had no past to speak of and no relatives likely to cause problems by asking questions. Sarah was dead. Michael had two siblings, and two half siblings, all still living in the Welsh valleys. Apparently they had not looked after him in life; there was little chance they would care more for him after death. Anyway, they were not consulted. Indeed, they were not even located. In a draft, unpublished manuscript, Montagu wrote: “The most careful possible enquiries, made even more carefully than usual in view of our proposals, failed to reveal any relative.”

Montagu never did reveal Glyndwr Michael’s identity. However, he could not remove his name from the official record, and he left personal papers that also identify him. In one letter, Montagu referred to Glyndwr Michael as “a ne’er do well, and his relatives
²⁸
were not much better … the actual person did nothing for anyone ever—only his body did good after he was dead.” It was true that Michael’s life had been a short and unhappy one: he had never done well, but then, he had never had much of an opportunity. Posthumously, the ne’er-do-well was about to do very well indeed.

Bentley Purchase warned that time was of the essence. The corpse could not be frozen solid to arrest decay entirely, since fluids in the body expand as they turn to ice, damaging fragile soft tissue, which would be only too evident once the body was defrosted. The mortuary at St. Pancras had one “extra-cold refrigerator”
²⁹
which could be set at four degrees centigrade (thirty-nine degrees Fahrenheit), cold enough to retard decomposition substantially, but not so cold as to prevent it entirely. The body of Glyndwr Michael was already beginning to rot. If the corpse was to be of any use, warned Purchase, it “would have to be used within
³⁰
three months.”

But before the operation could be formally launched, it needed a new code name. “Trojan Horse” had been acceptable as the initial title, but if any German agent were to stumble across it, the implication of some sort of hoax would be glaringly obvious. Code names were compiled by the Inter-Services Security Board, covering almost every aspect of the war: nations, cities, plans, locations, military units, military operations, diplomatic meetings, places, individuals, and spies were all disguised under false names. In theory, these code words were neutral and indecipherable, a shorthand for those in the know and deliberately meaningless to anyone else. Random lists of code names were issued in alphabetical blocks of ten words and then selected by chance as needed; six months after it became defunct, a code word could be reassigned and reused, a deliberate ploy to muddy the waters.

Churchill had a clearly defined policy on choosing code words for major operations: “They ought not to be given names
³¹
of a frivolous character such as ‘Bunnyhug’ and ‘Ballyhoo,’” the prime minister decreed. “Intelligent thought will already supply an unlimited number of well-sounding names that do not suggest the character of the operation and do not enable some widow or mother to say that her son was killed in an operation called ‘Bunnyhug’ or ‘Ballyhoo.’”

The rule requiring that code words be devoid of meaning was routinely ignored, by all sides, throughout the war, for spies found the temptation to invent joking and hinting titles for their most secret projects almost irresistible. Agent “Tate” was so called because he looked like the music hall performer Harry Tate; the criminal Eddie Chapman was named “Zigzag,” since no one could be certain which way he might turn; Stalin, meaning “man of steel,” was awarded the code name “Glyptic,” meaning “an image carved from stone.” The Germans were even more culpable in this respect. The Nazis’ long-range radar system was named “Heimdall” after the Norse god with the power to see great distances; the planned invasion of Britain was code-named “Sealion,” a most unsubtle reference to the lions on the royal coats of arms and the planned seaborne attack.

Montagu was scathingly critical of the Abwehr’s “stupidity”
³²
in selecting such revealing code words: the code name for Britain, he pointed out, was “Golfplatz,” meaning “golf course,” while America was “Samland,” a reference to Uncle Sam. Montagu now broke his own rule that code names be chosen so that “no deductions could be
³³
made from them” and selected a name that had been used for a mine-laying operation in 1941 and was now up for grabs again.

Plan Trojan Horse became “Operation Mincemeat.” There was nothing haphazard about the choice. All the talk of corpses was having an effect, and Montagu’s “sense of humour
³⁴
having by this time become somewhat macabre,” a code word that signified dead meat seemed only too apt and a “good omen.”
³⁵
There was no danger of any grieving mother complaining that her dead son had been deployed under a frivolous and tasteless code word because, as the planners knew very well, in the case of Glyndwr Michael, there was no one to grieve.

Even before Bentley Purchase had completed his inquest, Cholmondeley and Montagu set to work, drawing up a formal proposal to put to the intelligence chiefs. On February 4, a week after the death of Michael and on the very day Purchase completed his inquest, they presented a draft of Operation Mincemeat to the Twenty Committee: “This Operation is proposed
³⁶
in view of the fact that the enemy will almost certainly get information of the preparation of any assault mounted in North Africa and will try to find out its target.”

The plan envisaged dropping the dead body, with fake documents, from a plane, to give the impression that “a courier carrying important
³⁷
‘hand of officer’ documents was en route for Algiers in an aircraft which crashed.” The overall scheme should not only divert the Germans from the real target but portray the real target as a “cover target,” a mere decoy. This was a brilliant piece of double bluff, for it would ensure that when the Germans found out about genuine preparations to attack Sicily, as they must, they would assume this was part of the deception plan. Sicily could not be left out of the equation altogether, for as Cholmondeley and Montagu pointed out, if “the real target is omitted from
³⁸
both the ‘operation plan’ and the ‘cover plan’ the Germans will almost certainly suspect, as not only is Sicily a very possible target, but the Germans are believed already to anticipate it as a possible target.” Since “the Germans will be looking
³⁹
with care for our cover-plan as well as our real plan,” Operation Mincemeat would feed them both a false real plan and a false cover plan—which would actually be the real plan.

The outline did not go into specifics as to how this misinformation would be put across, nor where the body would be dropped, and warned that, once launched, it could not be delayed: “The body must be dropped
⁴⁰
within 24 hours of its being removed from its present place in London. The flight, once laid on, must not be cancelled or postponed.” The Twenty Committee pondered only briefly, before issuing a flurry of requests to the representatives of the different services. The Air Ministry should investigate finding a suitable plane, preferably one used by SOE; the draft plan should be shown to the intelligence chiefs of the army, navy, and RAF; Colonel Johnnie Bevan of the London Controlling Section should be asked for his approval; the Admiralty should “find out a suitable position
⁴¹
for dropping the body;” and the War Office should look “into the question of providing
⁴²
the body with a name and necessary papers.” The naval attaché in Madrid, Captain Alan Hillgarth, should be informed of the plan, “so he will be able to cope
⁴³
with any unforeseen circumstances.”

Montagu and Cholmondeley were instructed to “continue with preparations
⁴⁴
to give MINCEMEAT his necessary clothes, papers, letters, etc. etc.” Out of the officially nameless corpse in the mortuary they must conjure up a living person with a new name, a personality, and a past. Operation Mincemeat began as fiction, a plot twist in a long-forgotten novel, picked up by another novelist and approved by a committee presided over by yet another novelist. Now it was the turn of the spies to take the reality of a dead Welsh tramp, make him into a fiction, and so change reality.

CHAPTER SIX
A Novel Approach

M
ONTAGU AND
C
HOLMONDELEY
had spent much of the previous three years nurturing, molding, and deploying spies who did not exist. The Twenty Committee and Section B1A of MI5 had turned the playing of double agents into an art form, but as the Double Cross System developed and expanded, more and more of the agents reporting back to Germany were purely fictional: Agent A (real) would notionally employ Agent B (unreal), who would in turn recruit other agents, C to Z (all equally imaginary). Juan Pujol García, Agent “Garbo,” the most famous double agent of them all, was eventually equipped with no fewer than twenty-seven subagents, each with a distinct character, friends, jobs, tastes, homes, and lovers. Garbo’s “active and well-distributed team
¹
of imaginary assistants” were a motley lot, including a Welsh Aryan supremacist, a communist, a Greek waiter, a wealthy Venezuelan student, a disaffected South African serviceman, and several crooks. In the words of John Masterman, the thriller-writing chairman of the Twenty Committee: “The one man band of Lisbon
²
developed into an orchestra, and an orchestra which played a more and more ambitious programme.” Graham Greene, a wartime intelligence officer in West Africa, based his novel
Our Man in Havana
, about a spy who invents an entire network of bogus informants, on the Garbo story.

Masterman, writing after the war, declared that “for deception, ‘notional’
³
or imaginary agents were on the whole preferable” to living ones. Real agents tended to become truculent and demanding; they needed feeding, pampering, and paying. An imaginary agent, however, was infinitely pliable and willing to do the bidding of his German handlers at once and without question: “The Germans could seldom resist
⁴
such a fly if it was accurately and skilfully cast,” wrote Masterman, who was also handy with a fly-fishing rod.